Nabokov in America (57 page)

47
  
“him does the snake”:
EO
, vol. 1, 115.

48
  
“without avail”:
Ibid., 114.

49
  
shade of red:
Ibid., vol. 3, 181–83.

50
  
less than one hundred:
Ibid., vol. 2, 209. N. is counting backward from the time of the completion of
Onegin
, 1831. The Russian language had been standardized for the first time only in the eighteenth century. Mitchell, xi. The borrowing from other literatures came via French translations.

51
  
“Pétri”:
Ibid., vol. 2, 5–10.

52
  “
tipping a flippant tale”:
EO
, vol. 2, 5–6. On the first page of his commentaries (vol. 2, 5), N. in effect footnotes a footnote; about the epigraph, he asserts that it is almost certainly fictitious, but “for those who like to look for the [living] models of fictional characters,” take a look at some lines (vol. 1, p. 115, stanza 46), which, to be understood, must be read along with his comments in vol. 2, pp. 173–74. We are already in the sort of mad chase, involving fingers holding places in multiple locations, that begins the novel
Pale Fire
, which he conceived in the same years dedicated to his long labors on
Onegin
.

53
  
“
Why
did you visit us”:
EO
, vol. 1, 165. In his comments on these lines, N. says his italicizing of the word
Why
was “influenced by a wonderful record (played for me one day in Talcottville by Edmund Wilson) of Tarasova’s recitation of Tatiana’s letter.” Ibid., vol. 2, 391.

54
  
“No, to nobody”:
Ibid., vol. 1, 166.

55
  
She is replicating:
Ibid., vol. 2, 391–92.

56
  
“the dashes”:
Ibid., vol. 1, 261.

57
  
“And by degrees”:
Ibid., vol. 1, 262.

58
  
“At this point”:
Ibid., vol. 3, 85. When discussing Pushkin, N. believes in a straightforward way in evidence and reality. Cf.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, where a reader/investigator can never quite know an author/brother.

59
  
“with soft-melting gaze”:
Ibid., vol. 1, 259.

60
  
inspired by:
This painting was displayed at the British ambassador’s residence in Athens. “Lord Byron,”
Wikipedia
,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron
. The statuette could also be of Napoleon. Other translations of
Onegin
, e.g. those by Charles Johnson and Walter Arndt, say definitively that it is Napoleon. N. is silent
on the matter; he might have noticed that Napoleon is almost universally shown not “with arms crosswise compressed,” as Pushkin has it, but with one arm bent at the elbow and the hand disappearing in a tunic. The Phillips painting shows Byron with arms crosswise.

61
  
like émigré scholars of the day:
In an interview in ’51, N. confessed that he did not read young American novelists very often but that he was “a great reader … of the critics.” Harvey Breit, “Talk with Mr. Nabokov,”
New York Times
, February 18, 1951,
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/lifetimes/nab-v-talk.html
.

62
  
“This is a confession”:
Lolita
, 71. Charlotte’s “but what would it matter” resembles Tatiana’s “who knows” (both appearing in parentheses).

63
  
Nabokov the scholar traces:
EO
, vol. 3, 98–100. Eugene when he travels carries with him copies of
René, Adolphe
, and Charles Maturin’s
Melmoth the Wanderer
(the name Melmoth is borrowed for an automobile in
Lolita
).

64
  
“His is a checkered nature”:
Ibid., 100–1.

65
  
something in the novel to ripen … refreshed himself:
Boyd 2, 225, 310.

66
  
wrote nothing:
DBDV
, 308.

67
  
“By the age of 14”:
SO
, 46.

68
  
a kind of trial run:
Brodhead, 13.

69
  
“compel a man”:
Parker, 768.

70
  
“looking for”:
N., letter to the editor,
New York Review of Books
, October 7, 1971.

71
  
“sardine”:
Boyd 2, 502.

72
  
“Pierre Point”:
Lolita
, 34.

73
  
syllabus:
Boyd 2, 200.

74
  
he had already worked up:
Harvard made him add
Don Quixote
.

75
  
precursors:
Appel, lviii; Borges, 201.

76
  
anxiety about the world:
Brodhead, 5.

77
  
“I wonder”:
Moby-Dick
, 511.

78
  
“Sir, I mistrust it”:
Ibid., 521; author’s versing.

79
  
parodies:
For example, the Quilty-Humbert duality in
Lolita
, a kind of extended parody of the double theme à la Dostoevsky.

80
  
Boyd shows:
Boyd 2, 246–47.

81
  
“Greek-like simplicity”:
Gilmore, 109.

82
  
there
is
a child:
Pip is not, strictly speaking, a cabin boy, though he lives with Ahab in his cabin and might have served him as one. He was a ship’s hand who normally performed as a shipkeeper—one who stayed aboard when the harpoonists ventured out in whaleboats.

83
  
“Thou touchest”:
Moby-Dick
, 522.

84
  
three blacks:
The other two are Daggoo, an African harpooner, and Fleece the cook.

85
  
“velvet shark-skin”:
Ibid.

86
  
“Unless it can be proven”:
Lolita
, 300.

Chapter Fourteen

1
  
“Wyoming, 1952”:
NB
, 489–94.

2
  
Gathered around a central space:
author’s visit, September 2012. The establishment was still in business as the Corral Motel but about to undergo a renovation. The
log cabins of the American West closely resemble log dwellings common in western Russia at the time of N.’s boyhood.

3
  
“In early August”:
NB
, 493.

4
  
“palpating”:
DBDV
, 298.

5
  
begun writing:
Ibid.

6
  
wrote little:
Ibid., 308.

7
  
“spent almost two weeks”:
Ibid., 262.

8
  
annoying duties:
DBDV
, 300. N. wrote Wilson, “I am sick of teaching,” but he also reported on the fun of working up
Mansfield Park
and
Bleak House
for lectures, saying, “I think I had more fun than my class.” Ibid., 282.

9
  
“tempestuously”:
Ibid., 298.

10
  
“focus briefly”:
D.N., “Close Calls,” 306.

11
  
“the following order”:
SL
, 122. N. also said of his son that he had “a magnificent brain.” Ibid., 138.

12
  
“partner for tennis”:
“Close Calls,” 307.

13
  
associated with ascents:
Roberts, “Hearse Traverse,” “Harvard Five.”

14
  
climbers went to:
Harvard Mountaineering Archive.

15
  
did not climb on a rope with:
Interview with Peter McCarthy, HMC president, May 14, 2012.

16
  
published an article:
American Alpine Journal
no. 28 (1954): 196–200.

17
  
first ascent of Gibraltar:
Alden, 30, 33. The year of Dmitri’s first ascents, ’53, was the year of Art Gilkey’s death on K2 and of the British first ascent of Mount Everest.

18
  
“an elderly Packard”:
“Close Calls,” 309.

19
  
“doubt if we shall ever”:
Ibid.;
SL
, 139.

20
  
climbers died:
Harvard Mountaineering
no. 12, May 1955; “Close Calls,” 311.

21
  
“his third car”:
SL
, 138.

22
  
often worried:
Dmitri’s climbing passion slackened in ’55, when he took two falls in the Canadian Rockies. He decided to quit before killing himself. Boyd 2, 268.

23
  
Ashland:
The well-known Shakespeare Festival dates from modest beginings in 1935.

24
  
“no greater pleasure”:
DBDV
, 308.

25
  
modest wooden houses:
Theirs, at 163 Mead Street, belonged to a professor at Southern Oregon College of Education. It was perched on a steep street, and it burned down in September ’99: Johnson, Nabokv-L.

26
  
“more or less … coily thing”:
SL
, 140.

27
  
Véra hand-carried:
Schiff, 199. The Nabokovs feared sending it through the mails because the Comstock Act made it a crime to distribute obscenity that way. Ibid., 204. Schiff also shows that White held off reading
Lolita
for another three years, until March ’57; one reason was that she disliked having to conceal the manuscript from her colleague William Shawn. A detailed account of the shenanigans, showing White to have been ardent about getting an early look (before she then became reluctant), is to be found in Diment, “Two Lolitas.”

28
  
more shockable:
Schiff, 199.

29
  
to friend Wilson:
DBDV
, 314.

30
  
on the sixth:
Berg, notes for “Speak On, Memory.”

31
  
“sensuous … this fiasco”:
DBDV
, 317.

32
  
tormenting:
Was N. suffering and unhappy while writing
Lolita
? According to what he told his
New Yorker
editor, possibly. But a contemporaneous letter to his sister says, “I am fairly fat … everything is going wonderfully well.”
SL
, 139. He was joyful when he had the time to work on what he wanted.

33
  
as his own agent:
Véra did all secretary work and much strategizing.

34
  
Epstein esteemed:
Schiff, 205–6.

35
  
a better chance:
For Laughlin, see
SL
, 152; for Covici, see Schiff, 201. Joyce had had to publish
Ulysses
first in France.

36
  
willing to part:
Schiff, 201;
SL
, 147.

37
  
brought convictions:
de Grazia, 7–9.
The Little Review
daringly published episode 13, “Nausicaa.”

38
  
rose garden:
Rose imagery abounds in the novel, perhaps appropriately for a novel written partly in Ashland. This includes reference to Lolita’s intimate “brown rose.”

39
  
paperback from Grove:
de Grazia, 338, 370. The legal publication of
Lolita
in America in ’58 led to the republication of
Hecate County
the next year. Schiff, 236.

40
  
theme of sex with children:
Incest was a theme in Mary Shelley’s long-suppressed
Mathilda
and in
The Heptameron
, by Marguerite de Navarre. Dostoevsky treated pedophila in
Crime and Punishment
and in a chapter of
The Devils
, “At Tikhon’s,” not published until 1922.

41
  
a novel for readers:
Schiff, 236.

42
  
sold extremely well:
The novel sold 100,000 copies in its first three weeks of release; it was the first novel since
Gone with the Wind
(1936) to do so. Schiff, 232.

43
  
best work:
DBDV
, 317.

44
  
“character entirely new”:
SL
, 178.

45
  
“one of the few words”:
Lolita
, 330.

46
  
“exhilarating”:
Ibid., 333.

47
  
high spirits:
All of N.’s books, written wherever and whenever, evince a measure of gleeful verve.

48
  
“Indian paupers”:
SL
, 150. Dmitri had better memories, recalling “an adobe house in Taos … rented from a pair of opera-loving gentlemen. Its painful quaintness was … compensated by … a WWII Jeep in which I chauffered Father on lepidopterological hunts, and the first recording I had ever heard of Verdi’s
Requiem
,” which became his favorite piece of music. “Close Calls,” 315.

49
  
notorious widow:
Schiff, 203.

50
  
on his own:
Ibid.

51
  
“what agony it was”:
SL
, 149.

52
  
“poor Pnin”:
SL
, 143.